mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

On the Foundations of Earth and Climate Foundation Models

arXiv 2405.04285 ↗First posted 7 May 2024cs.AI eess.SPcited by 31

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Abstract (arXiv)

Foundation models have enormous potential in advancing Earth and climate sciences, however, current approaches may not be optimal as they focus on a few basic features of a desirable Earth and climate foundation model. Crafting the ideal Earth foundation model, we define eleven features which would allow such a foundation model to be beneficial for any geoscientific downstream application in an environmental- and human-centric manner.We further shed light on the way forward to achieve the ideal model and to evaluate Earth foundation models. What comes after foundation models? Energy efficient adaptation, adversarial defenses, and interpretability are among the emerging directions.

Key facts. Cited by 31 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 88 of its 134 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 7 May 2024.

Builds on

88 of 134 references.

References · 88

  1. 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,456
  2. 2023GPT-4 Technical Reportcited by 18,132
  3. 2023LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Modelscited by 13,958
  4. 2020Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Taskscited by 9,160
  5. 2023Segment Anythingcited by 8,158
  6. 2023Visual Instruction Tuningcited by 7,792
  7. 2023DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervisioncited by 7,764
  8. 2023BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Modelscited by 6,069
  9. 2016Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networkscited by 4,718
  10. 2022LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text modelscited by 4,131
  11. 2021On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Modelscited by 3,961
  12. 2019Energy and Policy Considerations for Deep Learning in NLPcited by 1,242
38 more
  1. 2024Vision Mamba: Efficient Visual Representation Learning with Bidirectional State Space Modelcited by 1,051
  2. 2022FourCastNet: A Global Data-driven High-resolution Weather Model using Adaptive Fourier Neural Operatorscited by 748
  3. 2023CogVLM: Visual Expert for Pretrained Language Modelscited by 704
  4. 2023Scaling Vision Transformers to 22 Billion Parameterscited by 690
  5. 2017DOTA: A Large-scale Dataset for Object Detection in Aerial Imagescited by 622
  6. 2019Does Learning Require Memorization? A Short Tale about a Long Tailcited by 452
  7. 2022SatMAE: Pre-training Transformers for Temporal and Multi-Spectral Satellite Imagerycited by 402
  8. 2023RemoteCLIP: A Vision Language Foundation Model for Remote Sensingcited by 357
  9. 2023ClimaX: A foundation model for weather and climatecited by 325
  10. 2022Scale-MAE: A Scale-Aware Masked Autoencoder for Multiscale Geospatial Representation Learningcited by 302
  11. 2020WeatherBench: A benchmark dataset for data-driven weather forecastingcited by 272
  12. 2023FuXi: A cascade machine learning forecasting system for 15-day global weather forecastcited by 237
  13. 2019BigEarthNet: A Large-Scale Benchmark Archive For Remote Sensing Image Understandingcited by 231
  14. 2023WeatherBench 2: A benchmark for the next generation of data-driven global weather modelscited by 227
  15. 2023Spherical Fourier Neural Operators: Learning Stable Dynamics on the Spherecited by 225
  16. 2021Seasonal Contrast: Unsupervised Pre-Training from Uncurated Remote Sensing Datacited by 214
  17. 2023RSGPT: A Remote Sensing Vision Language Model and Benchmarkcited by 204
  18. 2023SkySense: A Multi-Modal Remote Sensing Foundation Model Towards Universal Interpretation for Earth Observation Imagerycited by 202
  19. 2020RSVQA: Visual Question Answering for Remote Sensing Datacited by 197
  20. 2017Exploring Models and Data for Remote Sensing Image Caption Generationcited by 195
  21. 2020Geography-Aware Self-Supervised Learningcited by 190
  22. 2020FloodNet: A High Resolution Aerial Imagery Dataset for Post Flood Scene Understandingcited by 181
  23. 2024EarthGPT: A Universal Multi-modal Large Language Model for Multi-sensor Image Comprehension in Remote Sensing Domaincited by 181
  24. 2023FengWu: Pushing the Skillful Global Medium-range Weather Forecast beyond 10 Days Leadcited by 170
  25. 2023GenCast: Diffusion-based ensemble forecasting for medium-range weathercited by 169
  26. 2023CROMA: Remote Sensing Representations with Contrastive Radar-Optical Masked Autoencoderscited by 167
  27. 2022Forecasting Global Weather with Graph Neural Networkscited by 165
  28. 2022Pangu-Weather: A 3D High-Resolution Model for Fast and Accurate Global Weather Forecastcited by 164
  29. 2022SatlasPretrain: A Large-Scale Dataset for Remote Sensing Image Understandingcited by 164
  30. 2022Advancing Plain Vision Transformer Towards Remote Sensing Foundation Modelcited by 149
  31. 2022F-VLM: Open-Vocabulary Object Detection upon Frozen Vision and Language Modelscited by 149
  32. 2023Foundation Models for Generalist Geospatial Artificial Intelligencecited by 143
  33. 2022Self-supervised Learning in Remote Sensing: A Reviewcited by 137
  34. 2024LHRS-Bot: Empowering Remote Sensing with VGI-Enhanced Large Multimodal Language Modelcited by 133
  35. 2020MetNet: A Neural Weather Model for Precipitation Forecastingcited by 128
  36. 2023SkyScript: A Large and Semantically Diverse Vision-Language Dataset for Remote Sensingcited by 123
  37. 2023GEO-Bench: Toward Foundation Models for Earth Monitoringcited by 122
  38. 2022RSVG: Exploring Data and Models for Visual Grounding on Remote Sensing Datacited by 121

50 most cited of 88 All 88 (JSON)

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2024: 6; 2025: 21; 2026: 4.

31 papers.

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  1. 2025Towards a Unified Copernicus Foundation Model for Earth Visioncited by 52
  2. 2024Multi-Label Guided Soft Contrastive Learning for Efficient Earth Observation Pretrainingcited by 27
  3. 2024WeatherQA: Can Multimodal Language Models Reason about Severe Weather?cited by 21
  4. 2025Multi-Agent Geospatial Copilots for Remote Sensing Workflowscited by 20
  5. 2025GEO-Bench-2: From Performance to Capability, Rethinking Evaluation in Geospatial AIcited by 19
  6. 2025Deep Learning and Foundation Models for Weather Prediction: A Surveycited by 15
  7. 2025REOBench: Benchmarking Robustness of Earth Observation Foundation Modelscited by 13
  8. 2026Foundation Models in Remote Sensing: Evolving from Unimodality to Multimodalitycited by 12
  9. 2025Geo-OLM: Enabling Sustainable Earth Observation Studies with Cost-Efficient Open Language Models & State-Driven Workflowscited by 10
  10. 2025AgriFM: A Multi-source Temporal Remote Sensing Foundation Model for Agriculture Mappingcited by 8
  11. 2024Evaluating and Benchmarking Foundation Models for Earth Observation and Geospatial AIcited by 7
  12. 2024Paving the way toward foundation models for irregular and unaligned Satellite Image Time Seriescited by 6
19 more
  1. 2026Physically Interpretable AlphaEarth Foundation Model Embeddings Enable LLM-Based Land Surface Intelligencecited by 6
  2. 2024Machine Learning for Methane Detection and Quantification from Space - A surveycited by 5
  3. 2025ExEBench: Benchmarking Foundation Models on Extreme Earth Eventscited by 5
  4. 2025Foundation Models for Environmental Science: A Survey of Emerging Frontierscited by 4
  5. 2025A Genealogy of Foundation Models in Remote Sensingcited by 4
  6. 2024Beyond Grid Data: Exploring Graph Neural Networks for Earth Observationcited by 3
  7. 2025Daily Land Surface Temperature Reconstruction in Landsat Cross-Track Areas Using Deep Ensemble Learning With Uncertainty Quantificationcited by 3
  8. 2025A Survey of Foundation Models for Environmental Sciencecited by 3
  9. 2026Characterizing AlphaEarth Embedding Geometry for Agentic Environmental Reasoningcited by 3
  10. 2025Resolution Revolution: A Physics-Guided Deep Learning Framework for Spatiotemporal Temperature Reconstructioncited by 1
  11. 2025Field-Space Attention for Structure-Preserving Earth System Transformerscited by 1
  12. 2026YieldSAT: A Multimodal Benchmark Dataset for High-Resolution Crop Yield Predictioncited by 1
  13. 2025SHAZAM: Self-Supervised Change Monitoring for Hazard Detection and Mappingcited by 0
  14. 2025On the use of Graphs for Satellite Image Time Seriescited by 0
  15. 2025Geospatial Machine Learning Librariescited by 0
  16. 2025Adaptive Gradient Calibration for Single-Positive Multi-Label Learning in Remote Sensing Image Scene Classificationcited by 0
  17. 2025LandSegmenter: Towards a Flexible Foundation Model for Land Use and Land Cover Mappingcited by 0
  18. 2025Segmentation-Aware Latent Diffusion for Satellite Image Super-Resolution: Enabling Smallholder Farm Boundary Delineationcited by 0
  19. 2025MeltwaterBench: Deep learning for spatiotemporal downscaling of surface meltwatercited by 0